[laughter] >> guest: with a very young newt gingrich among others. [laughter] a very thin newt gingrich, too, but that's a different story. this is a book really about the reality that in 43 years that the two of us have been immersed in the politics of washington from one end of pennsylvania avenue to the other, we have never seen it this dysfunctional. the disfunction is at a critical mass, and we felt we had to speak out about how the problem is, as the book says, even worse than it looks. it never looks good. and we have to talk about who's at fault and what we can do to get out of it. half the book is about how we can get out of this mess. >> guest: the argument, basically, is twofold. one, we have now polarized political parties internally, homogeneous, very much at loggerheads much like parliamentary parties, ve innocently oppositional. but they have to work in a constitutional system that's based on separation of powers and checks and balances. the mismatch between our parties and our governing institutions is problem number one. problem numb